An Oxford Tragedy

 

 

            For almost a hundred years now, according to Martin Edwards in The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, there’s been a “seemingly never-ending fictional crime wave among the dreaming spires” of Oxford. According to Edwards, the mayhem began with Adam Broome’s The Oxford Murders in 1929. But many agree that the best of the early academic mysteries is J. C. Masterman’s An Oxford Tragedy (1933).

            Here the fictional Oxford college is St. Thomas’s, thirteen of whose fellows, attending dinner in the Hall on the evening of the murder, constitute the closed suspect pool. The story is told to us by Francis Winn, Senior Tutor in history, who has the narrative advantage of having been around long enough (as he often reminds us) to know all the fellows as well as the physical setup of the Dean’s rooms on the Quad where the murder takes place. The geography of Quad and Common Room, Hall and High Table, is the book’s territory and seldom strayed from. The lingo takes some getting used to if you’re not a product of Oxford. “I have sported the oak in my rooms,” says the Dean, meaning “I’ve closed the outer door.” Bumpers and toggers and Bump Suppers to celebrate victory in the former (boat races) are topics of conversation at the High Table, when they condescend to talk about the undergraduates. Another is a revolver the Dean has confiscated from an undergraduate and left lying, loaded, in his rooms. As Chekhov said of the shotgun on the wall in the first act, we know that revolver’s going to be used before long. When it is, one of the thirteen is dead, and then comes an interesting twist. Neither the ineffectual Winn nor the thorough, methodical Inspector Cotter of the local force will solve this one. The detective is a visiting lecturer in law from Vienna, Ernst Brendel, who has something of a reputation as a crime-solving amateur in his native city. Winn begs Brendel to investigate, and he does.

            Masterman gives us the solution to the puzzle three quarters of the way through, so that this quiet book has only a brief climax, and then a dying fall. Winn himself is a weak character, too prone to introspection, too hesitant and self-critical to act. But all this makes the book just the sort of mystery we might like to read when the world is too much with us and the times too interesting.